So you were the “horse armor DLC” of car insurance companies. Congratulations

has a tendency to crap the bed a few minutes after startup

Tell me you are an nvidia user without telling me. Either that is hard to believe. I use KDE daily for more than 8-9 hours a day, sometimes my pc goes for a full week without geting turned off, multiple apps tabs and servers on, themes installed, widgets on the desktop, I am such an extremely heavy KDE user you have no idea. Still, zero crashes. Sometimes something goes a bit “wut” like moving a window around gliches a liiiiiiitle bit, but it instantly corrects itself and goes back to being stable. And I am on Plasma 6.0.3, funny enough has been more stable than Plasma 5.

Update your KDE or use a distro that has better KDE support. Some distros fck up KDE packages and get it unstable. Fedora KDE is rock solid for example. Nobara has been great too and its now KDE by default.

Slowly more and more distros are looking over to a KDE future. GNOME devs being so incredibly hard to work with and this feeling of a huge community that is KDE and with how polished Plasma 6 is becoming, many distros are finally looking to at least give Plasma a try as a default. GNOME is well polished but there are so many extremely important and urgently needed features that KDE already implemented that are not even being discussed for GNOME. Many distros are getting fed up with how slow GNOME is into advancing their desktop. They take 2 years to change a few buttons around. And now that Plasma 6 has a 6-month fixed release schedule, it finally aligns with what distros want.

First Valve shocked the corporate distro world by choosing the seemengly less stable KDE as their default for the Steam Deck, which proved to be an amazing choice after all. Then recently, Nobara Linux, one of the most used Fedora distros, also switched to KDE as the default. And now Fedora is discussing into switching the main distro too. Qt6 is also a really flexible and promising framework and developers seem to have more fun working with it than with GTK4.

Recent switchers from Windows also largely prefer KDE instead of the minimalist approach, macOS-like GNOME. And linux has been gaining a lot of popularity and market share recently, and I could bet that a lot of these new users are not on GNOME, at least not on vania GNOME.

A great example is KDE having hit a HUGE record of bug reporting and feedback submissions, which means that more people than ever are using KDE actively and actually trying to help the project somehow. KDE has also been having a huge presence in social networks like YouTube and TikTok (especially because of its fun and interesting features that make GNOME look plain and a bit boring, needless to say GNOME vanilla wont convince a Windows user to switch…) which might speed up its adoption too.

Its a huge deal. If X desktop is the default, it shows that the distro developers and maintainers usually test and optimize more and better for that specific DE so your experience with the default DE will always be more stable and polished than non-official ones. Extra GUI tools that the distro makes usually are also better tailored to the default distro. Like Manjaro and all of their locale, kernel and other packages that are integrated inside the KDE settings. Or popOS and all of their utilities being integrated into Cosmic. Etc etc. More money and dev time is invested into the default DE.

Meanwhile I CANNOT be productive in GNOME. There are hundreds of maybe thousands of KDE features that make IT and dev work so extremely easy. I could make a 50 page comment just listing them. I can start with how horrendously basic and generic the default gnome terminal is.

But then KDE also is in fact good for average ex-Windows users because it has stuff where people expect it to, has features that people expect too (cough minimize/maximize buttons cough) and well yea KDE is better for average users.

So KDE is better for IT users and developers, and is also better for average users. And since it supports vsync off, VRR and HDR it is also better for gaming.

So wait is KDE better for literally EVERYONE? 🤔

Picture this: you buy a car. You buy a new set of wheels/rims and a new radio system with Android and whatever. You also put some new carpets on the floor of the car. Now you need to take it for a simple routine maintenance and checkup at the car brand official shop. After a few hours you go back there to pick you car up and it has the stock wheels, stock radio, stock carpets and everything and you ask where the hell is your stuff and ALL of them on the shop look at you confused like if they never seen any different accessory on that car before other than the stock ones, or don’t know what you are talking about. All they know is that the car is now “according to spec”.

This is what it feels like after updating Windows with Linux in dual-boot on the same drive.

Sometimes I feel like the managers of my company and many others companies like these are just a bunch of clowns, that keep getting fcked my MS but keep paying them Enterprise licenses that are sometimes thousands of $$ per month. If a service costs thousands per month, it shouldn’t be stressful to use and give so much headaches… I just think some CEOs don’t know that a company can function (sometimes better) without Microsoft products. From Office to Windows to Azure, many companies nowadays think they can only function if they pay Microsoft. And MS knows and likes this.

Hum if you jailbreak/root you always could and will always be able to use any third party app store. 17.4 didn’t change a thing for jailbreak users

Apple: we now allow third party stores! You just need to pay us 1 million $! (We hope no one does it). And you need to use your developer account, but its easy!

Epic Games: we paid the 1 million, we are gonna make a third party store!

Apple: bans epic games developer account “Epic Games is not trustable!”

Apple really looks like a 5 year old kid with its own make-up rules based exclusively on their interest and gets mad when those rules that they themselves created are still not enough for them to win.

It will only change if the developer goes ahead and makes a special EU version for the app. And many wont, because that takes too many human resources to do and maintain. This was a rule made by Apple on purpose, together with all their other malicious compliance moves: they made it hard for developers so devs will just keep everything as it always was and not use the new EU exclusive things

Thats mostly because of the overload quantity of ads, trackers, plugins, integrations, etc all websites have now. Using an adblocker halves your bandwidth usage. If you have a data cap, an adblocker is a must.

And then, optimization. As an Angular developer, knowing many websites nowadays are Angular or similar, the lack of optimization is a big problem. Most don’t even use lazy loading, not to mention managing the module imports into different components. They import everything into the main component and don’t do lazy loading leading you to websites that have 20-40MB (!!!) of initial load (when you open the website). This is so common that I think junior angular devs will slowly just kill angular popularity and give it a bad look. Takes work to optimize Angular, and many devs don’t care enough and just rush it. And then there are companies that don’t understand that web frameworks need optimization and just underpay devs or rush the dev time.

Please don’t use Angular (or similar complex web frameworks like Vue or React) if you don’t know how to correctly optimize it, or don’t have time or care for it. And don’t overload your pages with ads and integrations. You are ruining the web.

Reminds me on how they forcefully started slowly upgrading everyone to the new Teams app, that doesn’t support half of what the previous one did. For example, the company I work at actually used the “Wiki” on Teams to create very long and detailed (many hours of work) important documentation for projects. It was not my choice, but it was how the company decided to work. Well the new Teams app killed the Wiki. We lost access to a lot of documentation and the managers took a long ass time to understand our problem and only did when their own Teams also updated. We had to revert back to the old teams and constantly click ignore on the upgrade notification, while at times mistakenly clicking accept and having to revert back again, until we copied everything out of Wiki and to another platform entirely. We lost a lot of (paid) hours to just copy and reformat the whole wiki from many projects into a new platform. All this were paid hours, and money that didn’t need to be wasted if it wasn’t for Microsoft complete retardness. This together with other retard moves on other office apps is slowly convincing my company to completely get out of the Office 365 for Enterprise, including Azure and other stuff just because Microsoft is really getting on our nerves lately.

I don’t understand how can Microsoft do so much shit and still be so widely used and so many companies absolutely depend on Microsoft. If Microsoft sneezes, half of the IT world shakes. But those who suffer just keep paying anyway. Are we all clowns?

Streisand effect is currently very active on this one. Thousands of news outlets, many extremely casual and geared towards average joes who never new emulation existed, are now all being told that “this thing called yuzu can play switch games for free”. Nintendo is shooting themselves in the foot. Even if Yuzu dies, it will get forked and people who never knew emulation existed, now do, and look for alternatives.

Well I myself have no patience at all to compile stuff myself, I can say I am half casual half linux nerd. I’m in the middle. Compiling stuff is too much, especially drivers and low level stuff like that. At that point I will just give up on the hardware or the OS/distro. That’s mainly why I still dual boot. I have a SIM Racing setup and even with drivers that exist already and many awesome community made GUI tools (like Overdrive GUI) that get updated almost daily (which is impressive), it still is very hit or miss and most of the times it is either not detected at all or just half working. Even after using linux myself since the Ubuntu 7 and Gnome 2 days, I still dual boot Windows because well… sometimes life is just more peaceful when you can just reboot your pc and have funcional hardware again. I work under linux and play under windows. That’s peace for me. Except nowadays I am staring to play non-Sim Racing stuff on linux too because Proton is amazing. But it still requires a lot of manual labor to make it work. And when I teach linux to other people I always teach the dual boot way and how they can easily jump back to what they are used to. In your case… I think I would just get a different wifi card if possible. If its an embedded one, well… maybe I would just get a new motherboard/device anyway, or just use another OS and call it a day. Sometimes it’s the better way. In your case probably the amount of people that need drivers for hardware like yours is diminishing day by day, so the probability of it ever getting fixed also diminishes. I found out that in the Linux world it’s always better to stay with mainstream hardware as much as possible.

I understand, but seeing this post right after my experience today was the biggest coincidence ever and kinda funny that it worked right away in Linux while in Windows I had to manually go get the drivers for it. Linux used to be bad, but it evolved A LOT in terms of drivers support while windows just kinda stayed the same. I remember facing the same problem of booting a new Windows install and having the wifi option completely gone (no drivers) in Windows 8… many years ago. Windows 11 and the experience is still the same. And it’s a modern Realtek card, not even close to being obscure. This post + this experience today was just a nice internet moment

Funny that my brand new laptop just arrived today and its own wifi card wasn’t recognized in Windows, so I had to use my phone via usb-tethering. It’s a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 (14APU8) by the way, Ryzen 7th gen, full AMD, OLED etc. It came without any OS (no way I’m paying for Windows lol) and my first Win11 experience on this laptop was “please choose a network to continue” and no networks were displayed at all, because wifi card had no drivers (Realtek btw). Windows setup wouldn’t let me continue without a network, but there was no way to have a network. Funny Win11 moment right there. After some hours configuring everything I then installed my usual dual-boot Fedora and everything worked even in the live-usb. This meme is not valid for Linux anymore. Windows however, now thats a meme.

Because privacy and convenience are two extreme opposites and you can only go so far in the privacy direction before you start losing everything. Discord just works a million times better as a public forum/community than Matrix and is much more easily accessible to everyone.

There is a limit. I am privacy conscious but I still use all Google Services for example, because they actually provide me with a better web, work, mobile and entertainment experiences. Similarly, I prefer Discord for big communities with channels, server bots and topics, over Matrix.

Edit: all those people saying we can’t be privacy conscious and use Google Services at the same time: yes you can. Their services literally make my life better so I will keep using them, but I keep what I share with them to the absolute minimum. I go into their settings and disable everything I can about tracking and ads personalization (even if they still track me, I do my best not to be). You can surely still be privacy conscious using non-private products. Being extremist is not how you convince average joes to think about privacy, nor by telling them to give up all they use for unknown (for them) alternatives.